Management and dissemination of information is typically at the forefront of the administrative burdens for controlled-environment facilities. Such controlled-environment facilities might include, by way of example, inmate facilities (e.g., municipal jails, county jails, state prisons, federal prisons, military stockades, juvenile facilities, and detention camps), or hospitals, nursing homes, camps, schools, and the like. In one example, according to the International Centre for Prison Studies, the United States has the highest prison population per capita in the world. In 2009, for example, 1 out of every 135 U.S. residents was incarcerated. In such correctional facilities a great number of questions, commonly from a number of telephone calls may be directed to the facility's booking personnel, asking for details related to an inmate and his or her circumstances. Over the past several years, the sharp increase in the U.S. inmate population has not been followed by a proportional increase in the number of prison or jail staff. To the contrary, budget pressures in local, state, and federal governments have made it difficult for correctional facilities to maintain an adequate number of wardens, officers, and other administration personnel.
Friends, family or other constituents of a resident may call the facility looking for information related to a resident. Such calls have traditionally been taken by facility personnel who may have some booking information on the inmate. However, currently calls may be directed by an Interactive Voice Response system (IVR) to access electronically stored information. In existing controlled-environment facility IVRs, touch tone and/or speech recognition driven menus may allow friends, family members or other constituents of controlled-environment facility residents to speak the name of a resident and/or a type of facility policy, to self-service themselves without controlled-environment facility staff assistance. For example, a caller to a city or county jail may be presented with options such as “press 1 for inmate booking information, press 2 for facility hours, press 3 for visitation hours . . . ,” “say one of the following options: inmate booking information, facility hours, visitation hours . . . ,” and/or the like. These IVR systems ease administrative burdens on facility personnel. This frees significant numbers of staff hours for other tasks, allows staff members to focus on critical tasks without distractions, improves work atmosphere and staff morale, and gives citizens relatively faster access to information. Additionally, the time outside service providers spend on the telephone with the facility can be considerably minimized. For example, if an attorney calls a city or county jail to set up an appointment with an inmate, the attorney may be able to navigate the IVR system to gather scheduling information and schedule a meeting with the inmate. Further, such an IVR may be linked to other facility management functionality, enabling a function to be carried out by the calling party electronically, such as prearranging visitation, making commissary or trust account deposits, ordering, refilling prepaid calling cards for a resident, providing credit card information for use in funding commissary accounts, managing debit or other accounts, and/or the like.
However, when a constituent calls into a controlled-environment facility IVR the first portion of the telephone call is typically spent on “lead-in” questions such as the name of the individual calling, identification of the resident the call concerns, etc. Hence, the constituent must typically navigate a series of prompts in order to find resident information and/or fund a phone account, resident debit account, trust account, and/or the like maintained by the controlled-environment facility for the benefit of the resident. This can be quite time consuming, particularly when a caller finds it necessary to call multiple times a day to inquire as to whether or not resident information has been updated, for example.